Customer Reviews

Corydoras Catfish (Complete Authoritative Guide)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is not particularly well suited to the aquarium hobbyist. Its tone tends toward the academic side, with emphasis on classification of different corydoras species. Perhaps even more disappointing from the hobbyist perspective, though, was the organization. The chapters are organized around specific families of corydoras, rather than being topically organized (history, care and feeding, breeding, etc.). That means if you want to find, for example, information on general care and feeding, you can't just flip right to that chapter. Instead, you'll have to search through each page of the book and gather various bits of information as you go.

There's some good basic information in there that can be useful for the aquarist interested in raising corydoras. But it's not any more detailed than what you'll find on the web, and a whole lot harder to locate within the book. There is no index, so if you want to look up a particular species, it's going to take some tedious searching. You may do better searching for obscure species, but I was surprised, for example, to find almost no mention of corydoras julii, which is one of the more common species in stores. I would have expected some discussion of the frequent confusion between trilineatus and julii, for instance. All in all, it doesn't seem like a very practical guide to me, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're really focused on taxonomy.

This book has some good basic information for the beginner in the corydora hobby. It was one of my first catfish books and helped me to learn some basic information in caring for my fish.